Friday's Old Fashioned: The Parallax View (1974)

A newspaper reporter, Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty), hot on the trail of the suspicious Parallax Corp has maneuvered his way into earning an interview. He sits down in a darkened room and is shown a recruiting video that is more like a montage of Americana, each image unspooled before him representing a different patriotic-sounding adjective: love, country, mother, father, me, home, god, enemy, happiness. Eventually the video speeds up and the images and adjectives get mixed around, enemy becoming love, or god becoming country, and so forth. It’s like the “30 Rock” Sunstream ad (America – Innovation – Tomorrow) combined with “A Clockwork Orange.” Throughout this scene, director Alan J. Pakula eschews cutting back to Frady, simply immersing us in this video, suffering no pretense that this is anything other than his own movie’s thesis. Made, obviously, in the wake of the JFK assassination, released two months before Nixon’s resignation, distrust in institutions abounded, and this recruiting video becomes a manifestation of America’s fractured psyche, all its ideals and values having become so muddled it’s hard to tell which is which and what they mean or if they even mean anything at all. 

“The Parallax View” begins with a Seattle 4th of July parade, a scene of which Pakula himself said: “I wanted to start with Americana. And I want to start with sunlit Americana, the America we’ve lost.” In the ensuing scene, atop the Space Needle, a Bobby-ish Presidential candidate is shot. The audience in this moment is omniscient, made aware of a second assassin, though this person, the actual shooter, escapes while the other assassin is caught in a foot chase concluding outside the 605 ft spire. This sequence, scored to nothing more than the sound of the men’s shoes scuffling along the roof of the top house, is an impressive, frightening moment of thriller verité, not showing us the assassin plunging to his death, just suddenly, with one yelp, going over the edge, vanishing, which may as well be America itself plunging into an abyss. The getaway of the second assassin, though, leaves a web of mystery, as does the emergent truth that anyone who witnessed this person dies of natural (read: suspicious) causes. The truth is out there. And in the era of Woodward and Bernstein, it is Frady, a journalist, who will seek to uncover it. The truth, though, in “The Parallax View” proves more elusive, not just a moving target but an unstoppable torrent evoked in a scene where Frady wrestles with a local good ol’ boy sheriff in front of a dam, racing to beat the thunderous deluge before it drowns him. 

Three years after the Presidential candidate is killed, the case closed in a quick scene where a congressional committee asserts the person who fell from the Space Needle acted alone. Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), however, a news reporter who witnessed the death, visits Frady, her ex-boyfriend to express disbelief in the committee’s findings. Other witnesses have died off, one by one, under seemingly normal conditions though she’s convinced it’s a plot. Frady stands there and, like ten million dumb dudes before him, writes off a woman’s pleas for help with a simple, familiar diagnosis: she’s crazy. She’s not, of course, and Pakula cuts from billowy white curtains framing Frady to the white sheet at the hospital pulled up over Lee’s dead body. After a few beats, Frady enters the frame from the left, his head bowed, looking like a lost little boy. It’s not just what kick starts him to investigate but emblematic of how Pakula and Beatty, who worked on the script with his director, question both the idea of masculinity and what passes for a matinee idol hero. Frady gets into a barfight with a guy who, judging his long mane, thinks he’s a girl and he is typically outfitted in a denim jacket, a far cry from a suit and tie, a vestige of the counter-culture in a society, as “The Parallax View” sees it, of towering corporations who control everything. That includes the eponymous company, offering nothing less than the privatization of political assassinations, recruiting young men distorted by resentments and paranoia, burgeoning Travis Bickles every one, idealists gone astray, lonely men given a purpose in the worst way. 

Frady’s own loneliness is evoked in Gordon Willis’s famous cinematography, brilliantly utilizing space to render Frady as small and inconsequential, lost no matter how close he gets to finding everything out. He might play the hero in a stunning and mostly silent mid-movie sequence where he thwarts the bombing of a jet with a Senator onboard, but just as that sequence ends with him only staving off the worst, the bomb still heard exploding offscreen, he ultimately fails to save the day. The conclusion takes places in a giant auditorium staging a run-through for a giant rally scheduled later that evening for Senator Hammond (George Davis), the red, white and blue tablecloths stretching as far as the eye can see in a mostly empty place giving the impression of a party being over. Indeed, Hammond, showing up for rehearsal, is shot dead as a recorded version of that night’s prepared speech blares in the background, rendering his words as white noise. And when Frady, spying from the catwalks above, is noticed, he is fingered by the people below as the shooter, bolting toward an open door, the area around it draped in blackness while a white light pours out through the open frame. It is one last chance to see the light, in other words. Then, it all goes black. 

What the Constitution Means to Me

“What the Constitution Means to Me”, first produced in 2017 before moving to Berkeley Rep and then Off-Broadway and then finally to Broadway where it was filmed late in its run by director Marielle Heller, is based on the experiences of playwright and primary performer Heidi Schreck competing as a teenager in constitutional debates at various American Legion Halls around the country. As the play opens, Schreck, decked out in a yellow blazer, asks the audience to imagine her as a 15-year old girl just as she asks the audience to imagine themselves as men since Legionnaires were men-only. If it’s funny, in a broad kind of way, asking women and people of color to imagine themselves as old white dudes, it also speaks to the play’s duality, brought home in Schreck outlining the spoken and unspoken societal restrictions so frequently forcing so many Americans to be two different people. This painful reality, Schreck outlines, could have been prevented by the Constitution. But if our founding document installed certain freedoms by stipulating what the government cannot restrict, it also forewent stipulating certain freedoms that a government could (should?) provide, while fuzzy 18th century writing frequently left these matters open to interpretation, providing a lane for much modern legalese to leave so many, typically women and minorities, out in the cold. (There is an astonishing moment when Schreck simply plays the audio of Justice Stephen Breyer and the Originalist Flimflam Man, late Justice Antonin Scalia, arguing about the meaning of “shall” in reference to the 2005 case Castle Rock v Gonzales which renders these ostensible legal giants as nothing more than Slick Willie debating the definition of “is.”) 

Initially Schreck recreates one of her scholastic debates, the stage set up to look like the Legion Hall in her Washington state hometown, with framed photos of men in American legion caps surrounding her on the wood-paneled walls while a Legionnaire (Mike Iveson) issues debate instructions from a seat to her left. If at first Schreck assumes the overzealous air of a youthful debater, her smile epitomizing a tendency toward what she later deems psychotic politeness, the way she frequently leaves space after punchlines allows the concurrent melancholia in these punchlines to then quietly creep in. And if she admits the personalized argument portion of the debate was always difficult for her, eventually the lights dim and she discards her yellow blazer, leaving her 15-year old self behind, truly defining what the constitution means to her by melding her own life story with the stories of other women as she gradually, gracefully invites everyone into the show.

If the Legionnaire spends most of the show as an unsmiling presence, midway through “What the Constitution Means to Me” Schreck cedes the stage to him as he stands up, sheds the character’s uniform and tells his own life story. If that story is predominantly about coming out, however, the details mirror the hostility and intimidating air of violence as the experiences described by Schreck. And just when the play seems about to conclude, Schreck upends everything by converting “What the Constitution Means to Me” into a literal constitutional debate by bringing a teenage debater (Rosdely Ciprian) onstage to have an exchange of views on whether the Constitution should be abolished and remade from scratch or reimagined through the existing framework. And then Schreck brings the audience into the debate, not simply by having them express approval for their preferred argument but by choosing one member of the collective to decide which debater wins. 

I thought about this ending because throughout the filmed version of the play I kept wondering why Heller kept cutting to shots of the audience, like it was an HBO comedy special as opposed to a work of art unto itself. But, of course, Heller was laying the groundwork for this finish, ensuring we grasped, subconsciously or otherwise, the play was as much about them – us – as it was about her. And if I loved “What the Constitution Means to Me”, the structure, the performance (Schreck is exceptional at being rehearsed when she should seem rehearsed and spontaneous when she should seem spontaneous), the righteous anger that she lets bubble over even while marshaling comprehensive, composed arguments, I loved Heller’s direction too, subtly providing its own point of view that instead of subsuming Schreck’s enhances it. 

Throughout the play’s early scenes, as Schreck reimagines one of her scholastic debates, the camera continually catches at the end of sentences and in the middle of sentences glancing toward the Legionnaire because she knows she’s on a debate clock. But as the play moves out of this reimagination and into her personal history, she still keeps glancing leftward, an incessant reminder of women live looking over their shoulder, the proximity of Heller’s camera for these looks bringing them to agonizing life.

And Heller favors low angle shots throughout that seem to make those American Legion photos stretch on into forever.

Best of all, though, is a moment after Mike has deliberately broken, leaving the Legionnaire behind, told his story and sat back down. After he does, Schreck advises the audience that if they have not already done so, this would be a good time to once again to proceed as being who they are and stop imagining themselves as men.

After she does, the camera scans the crowd, letting that idea sink in. 

“You are welcome,” she reiterates, “to be yourself.” At which point she pauses, for just a second, and then smiles at Mike, transforming one of those little leftward looks mentioned above into something else entirely. 

And Mike smiles back, a shared moment of kindness. 

Rather than return directly to the play, however, Heller cuts to a shot behind Schreck, looking out into the darkness of the theater, lingering there for a just second. Because if this scene, just like the play itself, argues that we have the ability with words and amendments to make innate America as a sanctuary, a place fundamentally required to take care of its own, that idea, somehow, remains up for debate. 

In Memoriam: Jay Johnstone

In the early days of the Pandemic, when sports came entirely to a halt in America, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I would sometimes turn on the MLB Network during lunch and watch a little of whatever old baseball game they were televising in lieu of anything new. One of those classics included Game 1 of the 1988 World Series which famously ended on a 2-run walk off home run by a limping Kirk Gibson. I remembered the home run and I remembered Vin Scully’s extraordinary call, but what I did not remember was the at-bat’s entire rhythm. It was not just a home run, after all. It was Gibson falling behind 0-2 in the count to future Hall of Fame reliever Dennis Eckersley; it was Eckersley making frequent pitch outs to hold the runner at first; it was Gibson dribbling a ball down the right field line that thankfully went foul; it was Gibson laying off the first ball and then laying off the second ball and then laying off the third ball to bring the count to 3-2 and then going yard. It was a reminder that famous hits are, of course, part of whole at-bat sequences. Kirby Puckett did not just saunter up and blast a home run in the bottom of the 11th to turn Game 6 into Game 7 in the insane 1991 World Series; he did it on the 4th pitch, ahead in the count 2-1. Even Bill Mazeroski took one ball from Ralph Terry before belting perhaps the most famous home run of all time to conclude the 1960 World Series. 

What’s more, memorable at-bats do not even need to conclude with hits. The longest at-bat of all time, taking place in 2018, was San Francisco Giants first baseman battling Angels pitcher Jaime Barria for 21 pitches. It ended, however, with a whimper, Belt flying out to right. The previous record, a 20-pitch affair 20 year earlier, between Cleveland pitcher Bartolo Colon and Houston shortstop Ricky Gutierrez ended with the latter striking out. The single most critical at-bat of all time, as exhaustively chronicled by Dave Studeman at FanGraphs, in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of 1962 World Series with the visiting team leading by one and runners on second and third brought Willie McCovey of the Pirates to the plate to play hero only to line out. This goes to show that at-bats are often as much about the surrounding context, as Keith Hernandez memorably explained to Elaine Benes in setting up the details of the crucial moment in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series: two outs, bottom of the tenth, one out away from the losing series.

Now Baseball Reference will tell you that outfielder Jay Johnstone played for the Angels and White Sox and Athletics and Phillies and Yankees and Padres and Dodgers and Cubs in an almost 20-year career that ended in 1985. But true baseball aficionados know that Jay Johnstone played one additional, mystical year for the Seattle Mariners in 1989, including their one-game playoff divisional showdown with the rival California Angels. Johnstone led off that game, famously, controversially striking out on three pitches from Dave Spiwack. What rendered it controversial, as any contemporary account will recall, was the umpire’s behavior, seemingly more concerned with his post-call disco dancing then with making the call in the first place. Indeed, the third strike was called, as replays bore out, before the ball had even crossed the plate. In that way, Johnstone was reduced to the straight man in an at-bat comedy bit, his series of perplexed facial expressions in the face of the indescribable going to show that no matter how many practice swings you take, no matter how much tape of the opposing pitcher you watch, not matter how much you finesse those analytics, sometimes there is simply no accounting for the absurd. At-bats can be dramatic, grueling, historic; sometimes they are nothing more than fodder for comedy. I will not go so far as to deem Johnstone’s three-strike flame out as the greatest at-bat of all time but it is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, my favorite.

Jay Johnstone died at the age of 74 on September 26th due to complications from COVID-19.

Some Drivel On...30 Days of Night

“30 Days of Night” has a helluva hook. Set in Barrow, Alaska, the sun is setting for a month, plunging this place, the northernmost city in the United States, into its annual month of darkness. As you might surmise, this renders it a feeding utopia for vampires who, sure enough, as the sun slides behind the snowy horizon, send a freaky stranger (Ben Foster) ahead to warn of their impending arrival. If this stranger’s perfunctory demise seems designed to have a little fun with the prophet archetype, alas, the sense of humor is doused along with the sun, suggesting how director David Slade’s film, culled from a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, is not entirely successful. “30 Days of Night” is too long where tighter focus might have made it count for more and lacking in character dimension where a little more of it might do. Still, the obliqueness of the vampires’ motivations works wonders, transforming the inherent pointlessness of the gory set pieces into something truly sinister. 

As the movie opens, Barrow’s sheriff, Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett), investigating foreboding footprints in the snow, watches the last sunset of the month, the camera cutting to a close-up of a resigned Eben, letting us get a handle on what this means. It’s too bad, then, that “30 Days of Night” forgoes lingering onstitutes the apparently depressing slide into a monthlong night. No, as soon as the sun disappears, Slade sets the plot in motion, with Eben going all over town checking out various ominous disturbances while his ex, Stella (Melissa George), finds herself stuck in town when she’s trying to flee. If this relationship refreshingly remains ambiguous, allowing a few elliptical statements and inherent tension between them to do all the work, “30 Days of Night” is less successful cultivating dimension where the other town folk are concerned. When Eben cites the town hermit (Mark Boone Junior) for a traffic violation in an early scene, the Sheriff mentions the ticket is meant to keep him connected to the community, an idea that never fully blooms, even after the few survivors hole up together, because the hermit character and others remain undefined.

Given the intense circumstances, the laid-back Hartnett might seem an odd choice to play the lead. He isn’t and he is. He isn’t because ever since he showed up in “The Faculty” with a permanent sense of bedhead, he has come across like someone sleepwalking, perhaps undead, which makes him the perfect Sheriff for a town suffering through 30 Days of Night. If that’s a bit harsh, let it also be said that Harnett at least cultivates an impressive sense of panic as his character struggles to get a handle on what’s happening, as does George, both of them refusing to play resolute heroes the whole way through. The trouble really comes, though, with the movie’s closing twist, in which (13-year spoiler alert) Eben turns himself into a vampire since it’s the only way to combat their unstoppable enemies. 

If minimal backstory hampers our ability to sympathize with the townsfolk, a similar lack of history for the vampires proves a significant benefit. If their costuming is chic, and if Danny Huston as the blood-craving horde’s leader earns a few showy lines, mostly these undead villains are portrayed as nothing less than feral animals, evoked in terrifying howls, like a pack of wolves, intent on feeding and utterly nothing else. Slade underscores this idea with the movie’s most elaborate, evocative shot, one from above, looking down on Barrow’s main street as the citizens are massacred. More than Huston’s character declaring that God doesn’t exist, this shot brings that notion home, transforming the God’s Eye view into something distant and detached. In this way, the lack of dimension to the human characters might have been a strength had Slade rendered them as being reduced to animal instincts too. Harnett, though, in becoming one of Them, is too much a choirboy to pull off that comparison. Boone Junior, on the other hand, left me wondering what “30 Days of Night” might have looked if their roles were switched. When his character tries taking all the bloodsucking predators with him in a fireball of glory, for a second there, as it lights up his heavily bearded face, he looks like a beast too.

Spontaneous

The title of Brian Duffield’s “Spontaneous”, adapted from Aaron Stamer’s young adult fiction novel, refers to explosions. Not bombs or mysterious lights in the sky but people, human beings, teenagers, to be exact, who just up and…burst. We never see them explode, the camera artfully cutting away just before they do, but we hear these explosions and see their gory afermath. If there are attempts to unravel the root cause, this proves of less concern to Duffield than using the violent blasts to draw out mostly effective metaphors of the teenage experience. That is not meant to suggest the impact of the explosions is lessened. Even it becomes clear, based on narrative economy, who might be next, the sudden pop is still brutal, a life cut short just like that. And yet, what is horrific becomes heartwarming becomes humorous becomes horrific again, a deft balancing of tone, the explosions only enhancing these other traits and vice-versa, a wild mélange of emotions brought home in Katherine Langford’s ace embodiment of the hormonal teenage tempest. 

The explosions are not a worldwide phenomenon, limited to one suburban high school’s senior class, including Mara (Langford) and her best friend Tess (Hayley Law). Together they meet this unexplained disturbance with nothing less than true teenage dispassion, acknowledging and recognizing their freaky, frightening reality even as they maintain distance through a comical veil of irony. That bubble is pierced, however, by Dylan (Charlie Plummer), the lanky kid with indie rocker hair. The explosions have caused Dylan to seize the day, thankfully without declaring carpe diem, confessing his crush to Mara and buying a new car by way of an old milk truck standing in for standing on his desk. Mara and Dylan are not opposites exactly, but in his gawkily earnest performance Plummer exudes a sense of Dylan being curious about and excited by Mara while Langford evokes sincerity in her affection for Dylan while never sacrificing her give-you-shit-all-the-time attitude.

Even as they fall in love, however, the specter of death consistently looms, coloring their relationship in the light of Romeo & Juliet-styled fatalism, every moment when they’re close together causing you not to swoon but scrunch up, wondering, “Is this it?” In trying to diagnose the problem and develop a cure for these explosive expirations, the government briefly locks them and their classmates down, leaving Mara’s parents (Piper Perapo and Rob Huebel) with little recourse. If Mara’s mother and father never become multi-dimensional characters, they never need to, epitomizing parents losing the ability to protect their child from the outside world, making their avowals of getting Mara to graduation no matter what ring sadly hollow. No one knows if graduation is the magical demarcation line, but the idea that it’s floated suggests “Spontaneous” as an allegory for the main objective of high school merely being to survive it, though Duffield might have been better to further accentuate that analogy.

Elsewhere his analogies are more successful. In one terrifying sequence, a chain of students combusting sends the rest of them running through the hallways of their school, incoherently screaming, evoking an active shooter situation. And if Duffield’s camera work brings home the frenzied nature of such a moment, just rushing forward without any exact thought as to what you’re going or what you’re doing, he also knows just when to cut between Mara and Dylan and Tess as they lose touch with one another in the scrum, unable to get inside the moment and slow it down. And each time throughout a film when a student dies, we see his or her image, sitting down for a photo, as if it’s been culled from a yearbook, accompanied by a brief remembrance in voiceover from Mara, giving death meaning and letting us mourn it rather than chalking up to cinematic collateral damage.

If tonal shifts epitomizing teenage mood swings define the film, Duffield saves the biggest mood swing for last, plunging Mara into a depression any person who spent chunks of her/his adolescence wearing all black and laying on the floor and listening to The Smiths over and over and will instantly recognize. It’s hard to watch and Langford does not make it any easier, boldly refusing in these passages to surrender an inch on likability. In that way, we, the audience, become akin to her parents, trying to find that love in our hearts in spite of how she’s acting, understanding what she’s going through, a member of Gen Z recast as The Lost Generation’s young Alvy of “Annie Hall” realizing the Universe is expanding means the eventual end of everything. No, by God, you have to get out there and live, a dime-store truth that “Spontaneous” renders truthful enough by not tying it up in a bow and instead delivering it with a flood of emotion.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Though Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is a CIA codebreaker, combing books and magazines and letters to try and deduce patterns that might be useful to American intelligence, as “Three Days of a Condor” opens, he goes about his work day like, well, any old Joe. He exchanges pleasantries with co-workers, discusses a new novel with his boss, one Joe believes bears some sort of lingual subterfuge, before being dispatched to pick up lunch for the whole gang. For a second there, “Three Days of a Condor” feels just like “The Office.” But when Joe is at the nearby diner, an assassin slips into the building and murders everyone, shootings we see in cold, hard, clinical detail deliberately at odds with the initial warmth. When Joe returns, everyone is dead, putting him out on the street, literally, calling in to The Company via payphone who wave off their charge’s pleas for a safe house and tell him to find a hiding place on his own. That the setting for “Three Days of a Condor”, then, is Christmas comes across essential rather than coincidental. If for some the Christmas season suggests coziness, family, togetherness, for others it can signify chilliness, emptiness, loneliness, epitomized in Joe, a suddenly orphaned codebreaker fighting for his life.

If Joe is in the dark, we are not, not entirely, as the movie cuts back and forth between Joe and the government pursuers who may or may not all be on his side, scenes reminding us that cloak & dagger stuff really looks better on 1970s film stock. The German assassin nipping at Joe’s heels (Max von Sydow), meanwhile, proves not to so much be one of Them as an Independent, utterly detached from what he is tasked with doing, seeing all events as part of some calculus and eventually coming undone, in a manner of speaking, by an unlikely agent whose moves he can’t predict because they are predicated on desperation and instinct. Redford’s own innate movie star-ness, alas, expressed as an unwillingness not to appear cool and in control, means that in moments when Joe is ostensibly in over his head, like wielding a metal pole in a fight, he looks distractingly right at home. His bookishness plays better when he’s trying to work things through, foreshadowing “All the President’s Men”, or playing art critic in evaluating the monochrome photography hung on a woman’s wall.

That woman is Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) and that photography is hers too, seen by Joe because he takes her hostage to use her apartment as a hideout. This emerges as the movie’s most dangerous, delicate relationship. Dangerous because he’s pointing a gun at her from the moment they meet, yes, but also because they fall into bed not longer after, suggesting unsettling connotations. Delicate because Pollack avoids those unsettling connotations by tying their relationship into the movie’s broader theme of loneliness and how they each need someone else, right this very moment for their individual reasons, a manifestation of co-dependency as much as infatuation. Granted, inserting flashes of Kathy’s desolate photos might drive this point home a bit too forcefully. But that’s forgiven considering how Dunaway, at the peak of her powers, embodies the desolation of those photos, looking for all the world like she’s a bare tree in autumn. 

If “Three Days of a Condor” is filled with characters, twists and various other convolutions, the ultimate endgame is surprisingly simple and, by extension, truly hysterical. “This whole damn thing was about oil,” Joe says upon finally putting the puzzle together, a line reading that Redford gives the ring of being insulted more than surprised. It’s funny precisely because of how it renders this web of intrigue as uniquely American, not some bold, new conspiracy but much ado about the same. That’s why the movie nearly comes undone at the end when Joe gives a lecture about right and wrong, nearly tipping the movie into the territory of annoyingly righteous, though quickly recovering by demonstrating that his righteousness is misplaced. When he threatens to go to the news, he is told such a move might make him an outcast, those seemingly out of place carolers just behind him suddenly making complete sense, rendering a lone American hero as just another guy alone at Christmas. 

Ray of Light

Tomorrow Bruce Springsteen, Planet Earth Poet Laureate, drops a new album. But not only does Bruce Springsteen, Planet Earth Poet Laureate, drop a new album, he drops a new album that was recorded with The E Street Band, live, per The Boss’s own words, with no overdubs. God, that sounds glorious. There are few sounds on the planet to rival the majesty of The E Street Band at work with no overdubs. It seems that much more monumental and necessary given the state of the world, one precluding live music. Hearing Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band will have to stand in for seeing them.

It was 20 years ago this past July that my friend Rory and I flew to New York City for one day to see the last show of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s reunion tour at Madison Square Garden. If I wish I could say my first time in NYC was for something more than just seeing Bruce, well, actually, as much as I love New York, I don’t really wish I could say that at all. That? That was a good night in the world. You haven’t lived until your friend taps you on the shoulder midway through Bruce’s opening number, tells you to just stand still for a second and you suddenly realize you can literally feel a 20,000 seat arena swaying. 

The show itself was documented by HBO. I have the DVD, of course, and have watched it frequently over the years when I need a little kick or a little bit of comfort. And what the film, directed by Chris Hilson, captures best is Bruce and the E Streeters in their element. If occasionally the camera cuts to a wide shot of the stage, mostly it evokes an intimate sensation, opting for frequent single shots of Springsteen and his various rock ‘n’ roll compatriots as well as shots demonstrating the byplay between them. In a word: joy. “Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band: Live in New York City” is joy, which is pretty much how it feels to be at one of his shows. In that spirit, here are my favorite things from “Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band: Live in New York City”. 

This sense of camaraderie, of being bandmates and BFFs, is evident straight away when, in kicking off the proceedings with “My Love Will Not Let You Down”, Bruce turns toward the back of stage and, though you can’t quite tell from the screenshot, says a few words to Max on the drums. I can’t swear to it but I think Bruce is saying something like Are you ready, Max? and Max is saying something like I’m ready, Boss.

If you only know Max Weinberg as Conan O’Brien’s buttoned-up second banana, well, there was a reason Bruce deemed him Mighty Max. (The latest they-don’t-know-what-Born-in-the-U.S.A.-means brou-ha-ha merely reminded me, as it always does, that what people should really do when listening to “Born in the U.S.A.” is ignore the lyrics entirely and just listen to Max’s drums. They’re the truth as much as the words.) So. Let’s all behold the Mighty Max Drumming Face. I tried capturing the moment at the conclusion of “Prove it All Night” when he briefly erupts from his drum throne but it didn’t come out. You can see it at roughly 5:40 of the video. It’s worth it.

Because Garry Tallent, the bassist, never sings, you can sometimes forget he’s there. But he’s always there, hovering just over Bruce’s shoulder, the omnipresent musical concrete girder holding up The E Street Band infrastructure.

For a lot of Bruce fans, the supreme Nils Lofgren moment is his guitar solo on “Youngstown”, truly bringing the song’s howl of anger and desperation to life. Nils is such a humble guy, he just does what the band needs him to do even though he’s a more accomplished guitarist than its leader, and I love this image of Bruce ceding the spotlight. 

It’s not about the fans, I know, I said that, but. During “My Love Will Not Let You Down”, there’s a wonderful moment when the camera pulls back from behind the stage and you briefly see this middle-aged couple right down front. They are singing Bruce’s words to each other while Bruce is singing his own words to them and, boy, was there ever a more succinct image of Springsteen’s music as communion?

This look on Little Stevie’s face when Bruce is in the middle of thundering: “The heart-stopping, earth-shocking, earth-quaking, heartbreaking, air conditioner-shaking, history-making, legendary E Street Band.”

Rory and I were sitting behind the stage and I swear I have mental picture of this exact moment. Bruce & Clarence united in the name of rock ‘n’ roll. This image is the first thing I thought of the day Clarence died.

And then I thought of this: Bruce and Clarence swaying with the crowd.

And then I thought of this: Bruce & Clarence, in the middle of the “Badlands” bridge where they just step back as the crowd sings woah woah oh oh over and over, briefly conversing like they’re just a couple pals having a chat on a park bench.

“Look over yonder,” Bruce sings during the epic “Ramrod”, “and see the party lights.” At which he point he exhorts “Steve!” to literally look at those figurative party lights...

...which Steve does.

The music critic Steven Hyden has deemed “Two Hearts” as “the defining Bruce and Little Steven share a microphone and in the process symbolize the power of friendship song” and I enter the above image culled from the Live in New York City version of  “Two Hearts” as Exhibit A.

The best moment in this version, though, is this look Bruce and Steve exchange in the middle of it as they briefly back away from the mic before attacking it again, the biggest rock stars in the world just horsing around like The Garden is the Stone Pony. A look that is only slightly better than...

...this look they exchange during “Ramrod”.

It doesn’t look like much, I know, this half-grin from the late Danny Federici. But that not looking like much, that’s the whole point. Because this half-grin is in reaction to Bruce doing Bruce stuff at the front of the stage, shimmying and shaking and the whole nine yards. To someone like Danny, who had played with Bruce longer than anybody, seeing Bruce shake his ass for the benefit of all Madison Square Garden was like seeing the newspaper delivery person accidentally hurl the paper into the bushes again. “Huh.”

There is a remarkable essay by Cornel Bonca from 2001 about Bruce and what Bonca deems his Rock ‘n’ Roll Covenant, how Springsteen, in adopting a kind of manic preacher persona during his live shows, essentially dons a mask that allows him to “say things he wanted to say — things he’s been saying, actually, for twenty years in interviews — without coming off as a deluded messianic rock star.” This was especially true during the reunion tour for “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” when he stop mid-song to deliver a whole sermon about the formation of The E Street Band and how that formation cultivated the friendship he craved. But at song’s end, like a preacher putting the exclamation point on the services, he screams “Save me somebody!”, which provides Bonca’s essay its title. “And if you have the HBO tape,” Bonca writes, “you can look into his eyes and notice that he’s stripped off the mask completely, and that he looks way past intense or committed or passionate or carried away and, for a brief moment, looks truly, beautifully insane.” That look, it perhaps goes without saying, is the screenshot above.

Amen. 

Some Drivel On...Clockers

The title of Spike Lee’s “Clockers” (1995), culled from Richard Price’s novel of the same name, refers to crack cocaine dealers who work around the clock. An early scene shows them in their element, whip panning from the middleman to the dealer to the buyer, the camera positioned far away and low, as if we are investigative reporters taking notes on how the process works. Despite this, Lee eschews a docudrama or even a character study of clockers to provide a more patented, heightened portrayal of the vicious social pressures facing young black Americans within the nominally friendly environments of their own neighborhoods. The city block of “Do the Right Thing” transforms into a project in “Clockers”, the looming apartment towers rising up, looking for all the world like watchtowers keeping the clockers, who congregate on the park benches below, fenced in, mired in the cycle. The inevitable end point of that cycle is outlined in the sensational, somber opening credits, myriad recreations of grisly crime photos, young black men shot dead on the street, blood streaming from their mouths, brains on the cement. These photos are recreations of real ones, meaning that despite the dramatic license, Lee is doing nothing less than putting the truth right in your face.

The neighborhood’s ranking drug peddler, Rodney Little (Delroy Lindo), wants a rival dealer (Steven Adams) rubbed out, ordering, if not in so many words, one of his clockers, Strike (Mekhi Phifer), to do the job as rewards will follow. Strike, though, doesn’t have the stomach for killing, evoked in the ulcer eating him alive, and tries persuading his brother Victor (Isaiah Washington) to carry out the killing instead, preying on Victor’s good heart. Not long after, the rival dealer turns up dead. Pointedly, Lee does not show us the murder, just the aftermath, the body strewn on the sidewalk and Victor’s subsequent incarceration even as Detective Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) suspects it might have been Strike. It’s a whodunit, then, though Lee is less interested in charting a true investigative narrative than using it as a frame for the larger questions. The foremost question is dynamically presented in an early back and forth between several clockers about rappers, whether the only real rappers are the ones who live a suitably raw, hard lifestyle or the ones who preach positivity and a need for social change. These contrasting ideas are lived out in the dueling storylines of Strike and Victor.

Victor’s upstanding nature is conveyed in flashback scenes where we see him working security at a small shop and a managing a fast food restaurant, respectively talking an apparent junkie away from the store and chasing a few clockers away from trying to set up shop. The crude lighting suggests an exploitation movie which suggests Victor being exploited by the system in which he is simply trying to survive unbothered. Indeed, in Washington’s ever so slightly quavering body language, you sense his omnipresent struggle not to be pulled under and how subsequent violence can stem not so much from being pulled under but from the unrelenting pressure of trying to be pulled under. As delicate as Washington’s turn is, Phifer’s is more external and aggressive, maintaining a menacing front to fit in with his brethren even though the chocolate milk he drinks, stemming from the ulcer, in contrast to his cohorts’ malt liquor, renders him as something more akin to a lost little kid.

If he’s a lost little kid, that makes him susceptible to Rodney, one of those most terrifying characters rounded out with one of the most terrifying performances I can recall. Maintaining a friendly front called Rodney’s Place where he gives kids a place to hang out, proffering the kind of advice you would expect from any responsible elder, dutifully cleaning his arcade game machines, evoking someone who takes pride in his place. Yet that pride in cleanliness is juxtaposed against how he floods the neighborhood with crack while the manner in which he councils Strike, frequently pulling up alongside him in a car and inviting him in, draws the parallel of child abuse, a detrimental father figure luring everyone into his web, rendered all the more chilling by how calmly Lindo plays the part, even in his character’s moments of extreme violence.

Rocco, meanwhile, in convincing himself of Victor’s innocence and Strike’s guilt, to the disagreement of his partner (John Turturro) who just wants to close the case and move on, becomes a variation of the lone cop seeking justice. In discovering the truth as he saw it wasn’t quite the truth, however, he finds not justice but something far murkier, an open and shut case and no answer to society’s broader failures. And though Rocco is given no backstory, the decisions the character makes fill in the multi-dimensional blanks, cracking racist jokes but also talking a young black kid through a police confession to ensure he doesn’t ruin his life. Eventually, Rocco gets Strike out of town with explicit orders not to return. The concluding scenes, in which Strike takes an Amtrak cross-country, almost feel as if they are excised from another film, one probably featuring a white person, making me think of the moment from the 2015 documentary “In Transit” when an incredulous black man waves off a white woman’s lament that she is riding the rails because she’s at a crossroads as mere vacation. Strike is not on vacation and he is not at a crossroads; he’s broken the cycle. 

The August Virgin

Midway through the Spanish language “The August Virgin”, Eva (Itsaso Arana) ascends a Madrid hill with dozens of others to watch a meteor shower known as the Tears of San Lorenzo, coinciding with a celebration of the Saint’s martyrdom. As Eva settles in, she remarks in voiceover that all anyone needs to do to see the shooting stars is look at the starry black sky for as long as it takes. She might as well be describing her own plight, or “The August Virgin” viewing experience itself, or, like, you know, life, a trinity of sorts. Director Jonás Trueba, who wrote the screenplay with Arana, does not push Eva toward self-realization with a series of escalating narrative events. No, if several characters in “The August Virgin” refer to having a bit of “a wander”, Trueba refashions this apparent leisurely stroll as akin to Eva’s gentle variation of a hero’s journey. That’s why the movie, as its opening titles outline, is set in the early days of August, when Madrid’s heat is excruciating most residents flee the city, leaving it empty aside from a few celebrations at the city centre. 

Eva is written as a deliberately vague character. Indeed, her job as an actress is less about backstory than evoking a previous life spent inhabiting other lives rather than her own. As “The August Virgin” opens, she does not even have her own home, renting the apartment of a friend who is cutting out for those warm August weeks. After returning from a scorching walk around the city, Eva sinks into the sofa and the way she is framed, the shimmering light peeking through the curtains, makes it seems as if she is floating under water, waiting to surface. Later, when she is taking a bus, seemingly lost in her music, she becomes fixated on a younger woman listening to music too. When the younger woman exits the bus, Eva impulsively does too, following this stranger into a museum, as if trying to assume the nameless young woman’s existence. This brings Eva into contact with a guy she knows and though they hang out for the rest of the day, when they watch a street performance several hours later, his arm around hers, Eva notices the young woman from the museum, suggesting she is not falling back into old rhythms, as we might have suspected, but still on the trail of new ones.

That is why we never see this fella again, just as later when Eva runs into what we can only assume based on their hesitant but affectionate small talk is an ex-boyfriend, we never see him again either. Instead each of these encounters yields a new friendship for Eva. The street performer (Isabelle Stoffel) she sees turns out to be a neighbor at the same apartment complex and they become fast friends; running into her assumed ex causes Eva to skip out on the movie she was planning to see, since he’s seeing it too, and going another day where she strikes up a friendship with the amateur Reiki practitioner (María Herrador) sitting directly behind her in the theater. These blossoming attachments and the subsequent outings they share are what pass for “The August Virgin’s” plot but also the gradual emergence of its point. When Eva sees that young girl from the bus watching the street performer, Arana lets Eva’s lips curl into a surprised but pleased grin, the kind that both can’t quite believe what he's seeing but loving that she is. There is some sort of mystical current tracking through this string of convenient encounters which becomes all the more potent because of Trueba’s quiet style.

There is plenty of conversation here, though Eva frequently is not taking part, just listening, as other characters debate the notions of, well, let’s just say it, Finding Yourself. Eva, we learn, has never left Madrid, and characters wonder whether you have to go somewhere else to ascertain who you truly are or whether staying where you are and simply paying closer attention to that place’s rhythms will do the trick. But between a new apartment and metaphorically entering another life, Eva finds a way to do both, stepping into a new life without leaving Madrid, giving herself over to its early August rhythms and to the rhythms of life in general. “The August Virgin” has more in common with the considerable oeuvre of Éric Rohmer then it does the Bible but that title is just conspicuously sitting there nonetheless, as a late movie development goes to show. This nominal twist might have been far too on the nose if the movie wasn’t openly treating it more as a metaphor than a literal plot development, aided by Arana’s just roll with it reaction. Like the Virgin Birth is something you accept or you don’t, the rhythm of an early August in Madrid is one you embrace or escape. 

The 10 Best Kicking and Screaming Quotes

Twenty-five years ago this month, Noah Baumbach’s debut feature film “Kicking and Screaming” was screened for the first time at the New York Film Festival and then, two days later, released into theaters – or, a theater, per Box Office Mojo, where it pulled down $77,000 down less than “Apollo 13” (which had already been in theaters for 3 months). If Baumbach’s indie earned solid critical marks and stuck around in theaters for another six months, it left little of a cultural imprint in the moment. No, as a talky indie with little visual style to stand out but hysterical snark and wit in spades, “Kicking and Screaming” was tailor-made for the small screen experience and being passed along word of mouth. (That was how I discovered it, from the the recommendations of a couple friends). The people watching it tended to be mired in a similar abyss to the characters, a quartet of college graduates stuck in that strange netherworld between having just received their diploma and starting real life, when all you really wanna do is sit around a table in a bar and toss back glasses of cheap beer and trade quotes from whatever thing you’ve all been watching. In “Kicking and Screaming”, the thing you’ve all been watching and existence merged. There is no movie I’ve ever found to be more quotable. To this day my friend Ashley and I occasionally sign off emails not with our names but “Kicking and Screaming” quotes. And that brings me to the point of this post.

I could write an essay about the film, of course, personal or otherwise, but an essay requires diligent work and thought and that does not feel true to a movie where Parker Posey’s Miami memorably says of her boyfriend “He says he’s doing homework, but I think he just watches TV and drinks Colt 45.” (See how I have already ingeniously squeezed a quote in here?) No, finally, definitively, arrogantly counting down its 10 greatest quotes, that feels right. Lists might typically be puerile where a movie that has graduated from cult status to Criterion might be concerned but in the case of “Kicking and Screaming” that puerility is sort of the point. And though there are so many quotes I could have done 20 or 25 or even 50, that feels like cheating, cheapening my task. These are the 10 best quotes in the most quotable movie ever; they need to count. And though some of these quotes are dependent upon their surrounding context and line readings, the staff at Cinema Romantico has nevertheless voted to present the list context-free. If you know, you know. If you don’t, get to it; “Kicking and Screaming” is streaming on Netflix. And now, let’s do it. 

Can you name the 10 best quotes from “Kicking and Screaming”? Ding!

The 10 Best Kicking and Screaming Quotes

10. “You know what I wish? I wish we were just going off to war. Or retiring. I wish I was just retiring after a lifetime of hard labor.”

9. “Well, there is that dark side to the nose ring.”

8. “Potato is an entrée?”

7. “You know what I noticed near the end of the book, when Grady goes to the prison? That the violence, which has up to then had a ferocious energy about it, departed from the emotional violence and became terrifyingly brutal and real. And particularly after he left the prison, and he went to find that horse. I found the descriptions of the horse to be, frankly astonishingly beautiful, and yet disturbingly arousing. What are your thoughts?” 

“Um, yeah. Yeah. Definitely. You really- you’ve pinned down what it is about the book. Uh, definitely with the prison when, um - when Grady is, um – there’s violence. There’s a lot of violence. And it’s like night and day. And when Grady, uh- he saw all those- those horses, I think you were saying, and it was... arousing. It was violently arousing.” 

“Otis, have you read this book?” 

“Yes. ... No.”

6. “It’s like a piece of chicken wing. Or a cheese fry.”

5.“You know, racism spans the globe. From Howard Beach to Crown Heights, we witness acts of hatred.” 

“What does that mean, ‘from Howard Beach to Crown Heights’? That’s like from the living room to the dining room we witness acts of hatred. Racism spans from here to the dance floor.” 

“So much anger.”

4. “Despite my efforts, my intense efforts to do nothing, things happen anyway.”

3. “Oh, I’ve been to Prague. Well, I haven’t ‘been to Prague’ been to Prague, but I know that thing; that, ‘Stop shaving your armpits, read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, date a sculptor, now I know how bad American coffee is thing.'” 

“Beer. They have good beer there.” 

“… ‘Now I know how bad American beer is thing.’”

2. “Ah. The fan. The trusty fan. Everyone brings this to school, uses it for about three or four days and then shoves it in the closet for the remainder of the semester.” 

“I use that fan all the time. All the time.”

1. “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back on it in my memory, and I didn’t have a good time.”